A posture of gratitude
The last several Novembers, our family has made a Thankful Turkey (if you follow Busy Toddler or are an elementary school teacher, you already know what I’m talking about). We slowly add feathers over the course of the month, writing something we’re thankful for on each one. My favorite additions this year were “vampire bats,” “juice,” and “talking in Japanese” (which none of us knows how to do. I tried to shoehorn that into “languages,” but Noah insisted on Japanese specifically).
Our family has a lot of fun with our Thankful Turkey, and I’ll take every opportunity to recognize and celebrate together the good gifts God has given us. But personally, I have a complicated relationship with gratitude lists. I like them in theory, and I get the psychology and even the theology behind them. But in actual practice, gratitude lists are often a source of shame for me.
Perhaps this is because I’m most often encouraged to remember all I have to be thankful for when I share about something difficult I am going through. For me, it takes a fair amount of courage to say out loud to another person that I’m overwhelmed, uncertain, worn out, or discouraged. And when that is met with, “Oh, but just think how good God has been to you,” or “I know that’s hard, but just be thankful it’s not something even worse like what so-and-so is going through,” no matter how kindly meant, Shame whispers, “See? You have no right to feel the way you do. You are just ungrateful. Your ingratitude has dishonored God. He is not pleased with you.”
The good things that gratitude lists promise to grow in me just seem to get distorted as they pass through parts of my heart that still need healing. If you love a good gratitude list, right on—keep right on loving it! But I wonder if shame has co-opted this practice for some of you, too?
I truly do believe our hearts were made to rise in gratitude, thanksgiving, and worship to God. Gratitude lists may be counterproductive for me, but the practice of thanksgiving is essential and, for the believer, not really presented as optional. For me, I’ve found that the practice that has done the most to cultivate a heart of gratitude to God is not a mental list when I’m feeling down, but a physical posture that allows me to lift a heart of praise right in the moment.
Sometimes, out of nowhere, I experience a moment that just…shimmers. Do you know what I mean? I find that for me it tends to happen in the smaller, in-between moments: catching Jane admiring her fairy wings and tutu in the mirror, hearing the kids laughing together on the way home from picking up Sam at school, being surrounded my church family singing in worship together, a strong sense of being held by God after a difficult conversation, watching the snow fall as I read on the couch, the way the smell of my favorite chicken soup wafts into the air as I stir it. It’s everyday stuff that happens fairly regularly, but it’s as though I am aware in a special way of God enjoying this moment with me, like we’re smiling at each other over it.
In moments like this, when I recognize that “shimmer” in my soul, I gently open my hand just for a moment. That’s it, guys. It’s simple, probably unnoticeable to those around me. In the same way that I hold out my upturned, open hands when I receive the bread during the Eucharist (which means “thanksgiving”), this posture, this physical act, has been an embodied way for me to acknowledge and receive these moments as a gift from God, and to hold them before him in thanksgiving, humility, and worship.
These shimmers in the in-between nooks and crannies of my day would not likely find a place on a gratitude list alongside the “big stuff”—family, home, good friendships, health, fulfilling work, etc. But when I reach for God in the exact moment that I see him seeing me, the Spirit is enabling me to abide more fully in the presence of the Giver of all good things. We are pursuing less than God has for us if we treat gratitude as a means of self-improvement or self-actualization or even solely as an act of obedience. In giving thanks, we are being invited to know the living God. And it is him—he himself, his actual presence with me and in me—not the open hand or being in the moment or the gratitude list, that will form in me a heart that exalts his name and gives thanks in every single circumstance.